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Comment by Frozenlock | Hacker News Reader

For those arguing that they are within their rights, and free speech laws don't apply there: that's not the point. (Like most of similar situations by the way.)

It's about a company acting in a way that is alienating to its userbase. Now, many people might think retard is offensive and would prefer a sanitized environment... but many people don't. Saying "we disagree with what you did" is a way to the users to tell the company that they might be drifting away from what made them interesting in the first place.

You can be legal AND an asshole.

If every time your friend was being an asshole to you, he'd stop listening and said: "Well, it's legal.", he probably wouldn't be your friend for long.

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It's about a company acting in a way that is alienating to its userbase.

Wouldn't that depend on the userbase? If there are more people using Github who would prefer it was a sanitized environment than people who think anything should be allowed then Github removing this content would be them acting not to alienate its userbase. The majority of users probably don't care either way, so we're only talking about the two extremes - and I'd hazard a guess that there are far more people who would rather Github didn't have an "anything goes" policy than did.

How do you know that the majority of users don't care? Did you or anybody else run any surveys or was that thought pulled out of your ass?

I'm hearing this argument a lot on HN, yet it is never accompanied by numbers and because it's always contrary to my experience. Would you say the same thing about Sourceforge? Of course, there's a difference between piggybacking on the work of others to distribute malware and censoring some words, however there's also similarity. GitHub censoring content means they are not a neutral platform for hosting public repositories and they are showing their potential for becoming the next Sourceforge.

GitHub censoring content means they are not a neutral platform for hosting public repositories and they are showing their potential for becoming the next Sourceforge.

In the same way that because I punched my brother as a child I might go on to be the next Stalin.

Punching your brother doesn't make you Stalin, but it's still an action you have to apologize for, otherwise you're an asshole, hence my argument.

As you say, punching your brother doesn't make you Stalin, just as requesting a repo changes it's name doesn't mean you'll go on to infect all the downloads with malware.

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